In this paper I will be reviewing literature, mostly from cognitive science, related to the human brain’s processes of categorization

B.Inductive inferences in ethnic groups

As in generic-species, there is great inductive potential in ethnic groups, for much of what one learns about one member of an ethnie can be extrapolated to the others. This may be counter-intuitive to anthropologists and sociologists, post-Barth, who have decided that ethnic groups and ‘cultures’ are not coextensive, so I elaborate.

What many take to be Barth’s (1969) views on the relationship between ethnicity and culture have become widely accepted. He is often presented by others as debunking the idea that ethnic boundaries organize culture; following his critique, anthropologists have become very skeptical that ascriptive boundaries closely correspond to ‘culture’ boundaries.

Such interpretations of Barth are in fact dead wrong. What Barth debunked was the idea that ethnic boundaries organize the totality of culture in a holistic wayi.e. that ethnic boundaries are closely coextensive with discontinuities in “trait inventories” arbitrarily compiled. But practically in the same breath he insisted that what ethnic boundaries do enclose is “ethnic organization” (Barth 1969:12), and that the cultural content relevant to ethnic groups is (1) the diacritical features that signal membership, and (2) “basic value orientations: standards of morality and excellence by which performance is judged” (ibid. p.14). So long as we agree that standards of performance are ‘culture’, Barth is not really subtracting all culture from ethnicity, as if ethnic ascriptions were truly arbitrary, but rather insisting on distinguishing the kind of culture that is most relevant to ethnicity: standards of performance, and the diacritica that signal membership inside a performance-norm boundary. As Barth himself has recently observed (Barth 1994:12), this part of his argument is often ignored.

. . .the issue of cultural content versus boundary, as it was formulated [by Barth (1969)], unintentionally served to mislead. Yes, it is a question of analyzing boundary processes, not of enumerating the sum of content, as in an old-fashioned trait list. But locating the bases of such boundary processes is not a question of pacing the limits of a group and observing its markers and the shedding of members. . .central and culturally valued institutions and activities in an ethnic group may be deeply involved in its boundary maintenance by setting internal processes of convergence into motion; and we need to pay special attention to the factors governing “individuals’ commitments to the kind of personhood implied by specific ethnic identities” Haaland 1991:158).—Barth (1994:17-18)

Lest we lose the thread, notice for now that concepts of personhood, as such phenomena get realized through the observation of performative norms with interactional consequences, are hardly things that are readily apparent on the casual inspection of an ethnic actor. So if Barth is right, this would mean that fully-socialized members of an ethnic outgroup (and even of the ingroup!) will have lots of strongly correlated ‘hidden’ properties. I shall come back to this question shortly.

It would indeed be remarkable if Barth were wrong. Explaining ethnicity in the absence of any real ‘substance’ that such mutual ascriptions organize would present an awful challenge. Surely, ethnic ascriptions occur for a reason. Barth’s answer (in fact, a commonly held view; e.g. Smith 1986:41, Deutsch 1953) is that they are there to demarcate ‘ways of being’.

According to him, we must define ethnic groups in terms of the actors’ own ascriptions because these imply commitments to certain interactional norms: “if they say they are A. . .they are willing to be treated and let their own behavior be interpreted and judged as A’s and not as B’s” Barth (1969:15). Coethnics therefore understand each other to be “playing the same game.” Barth explains the maintenance of ethnic boundaries in terms of the punishments that accrue to those who fail to fulfill the normative expectations held by their coethnics. Such punishments enforce ingroup conformity and maintain normative differences between ethnic groups, which differences in turnbecause actors assume they are signaled in ethnic diacritica and ascriptionsentail constraints on inter-ethnic interaction (Barth 1969:17-18).

Barth would probably hate having this pointed out but his argument for the maintenance of the boundary sounds very much like the feedback mechanisms of earlier functionalists (it is practically a Durkheimian social-solidarity argument). The only thing missing is the obligatory claim that it is adaptively functional for the group to enforce observance of its norms at a high level, which, although missing, is a quite reasonable proposition (which cannot be explored here). However, Barth says nothing about coordination costs, even though these suffice for boundary maintenance, and even though they supply a way out of the usual circularity of functional explanations by providing a very plausible, mechanistic explanation for the original emergence of ethnic boundaries.

Humans should be conformists because in this way they can maximize the number of potential interactants in their local community with whom to engage in mutually beneficial cooperative and coordinated endeavors (Robert Boyd, personal communication). Much evidence from psychology (e.g. the entire literature on ‘pluralistic ignorance’; Miller & McFarland 1991) bolsters this contention. The classical example is: when in Britain, drive on the left side of the road, because that’s what all the Brits do. This would be sound advice, of course, even if there were no ‘bobbies’ to inflict polite scoldings, and the wisdom it contains is routinely repeated as common sense in the universally known proverb “when in Rome, do as the Romans.” Notice also that the proverb and example contain wisdom about what to do when one is a migrant. In an ancestral environment composed of wise conformists, migrants from one community into another would absorb the norms of the host community and this would prevent the blending-of-norms effect that migrants would otherwise have on cultural variation, ensuring in this way that at least some important interactional norms would regularly clump discontinuously across the human landscape. Thus, it seems plausible that posterior to the emergence of the conformist adaptation, the ancestral environment became populated with more or less well-defined, discontinuous norm-clumps. There are two reasons why thinking of such incipient ethnic groups as ‘natural biological kinds’ is advantageous in these circumstances:

(1) Interactions with those socialized into different interactional patterns and expectations will not as often be felicitous, and the costs incurred––in energy and time spent and wasted––will concede the evolutionary advantage to any mutants who manage somehow to discriminate (I am indebted to Robert Boyd, personal communication, for this argument). A naïve ‘living kinds’ theory of the social world, coupled with a self-similarity preference bias, would represent ego’s norm-group in her mind as one ‘kind’, and other norm-groups as different ‘kinds’, thus making the interactional choices favored by the self-similarity bias rather clear.

(2) To the extent that outgroup members do not become irrelevant, adaptation to a norm-clumped world presents the dual challenge of avoidance and prediction. It is certainly best to be able to predict as much as possible about outgroup members without having to obtain this knowledge through too much costly interaction with them. Since conformist behavior will ensure that members inside the same ‘conformist sampling horizon’ (i.e. inside the same norm-boundary) will show strong intercorrelations for many non-obvious behavioral patterns and expectations, inductive inference (from the one to the many) will usually be a good way of cheaply obtaining such valuable information.

When individuals, through trial and error, learned that marrying outside one’s norm-boundary carried enormous costs (because of different rearing, adoption, conjugal, and other practices; see Nave 1997), such incipient ethnic groups became endogamous. And because culture is acquired at a young age and tends to be developmentally stable, expert practitioners of the groups norms would also be those born into the group. When such groups began labeling themselves, it is only natural that category-based endogamy and descent-based membership primed the living-kinds module, for these two characteristics are highly diagnostic of biological species. Because the priming of this module would have had salutary adaptive consequences (prevent intermarriage, prevent costly interaction, promote efficient and informative inductive inferences of non-obvious properties) there was no selection to discourage such priming.

A good case can be made that the social psychology program which investigates social stereotypes, and which got its start with Gordon Allport’s The nature of prejudice (Allport 1954), has been investigating some of the pernicious effects of ‘natural kind’ discriminations and inductive inferences in the social arena. An often reported result in this literature is that what is learned about one individual of an ethnic outgroup member is then assumed to be true of the whole ethnie (bunch of references).

C.Speculations

A recent model suggests that there have been selection pressures, acting on our culture, promoting the widespread practice of marking and broadcasting ethnic membership with obvious and colorful diacritica (McElreath & Boyd, forthcoming). It seems plausible that they have also been acting on our biology and promoting a bias for naively assuming that such diacritica in fact signal ‘kinds’. This latter development qualifies as a bona-fide evolutionary novelty (i.e. new machinery) rather than an exaptation, and it may explain why we naturalize so-called ‘races’ (see Hirschfeld 1996 for evidence that we do).

In the ancestral environment, neighboring ethnies probably almost never showed sharp phenotypic gradients. The modern situation where people with radically different phenotypes live side by side is just that, modern—and quite recent, evolutionarily speaking. Thus, perhaps when radically different physical phenotypes come into contact, the phenotypes prime the ‘ethnic identification module’, as if they were ethnic diacritica. This then makes, in our cognition, ‘living kinds’ out of so-called ‘races’, even though not the longest stretch of the imagination can succeed in characterizing such putative ‘groups’ as representing norm or behavioral boundaries of any kind (which is the original reason for exapting the living kinds module). Darwinians should recognize this as a ‘big mistake’ hypothesis for racialist thinking (the resulting pun is not really intended but entirely appropriate).

Finally, in my assumed Plio-Pleistocene ancestral environment, with practically no hierarchy or division of labor, endogamous units would typically have corresponded with actual norm groups. In modern, differentiated societies, it is often the case that––within a norm group (e.g. in India)—occupational groups become ‘classes’ and, as they do, they tend to become endogamous. When endogamy is strong, the category is naturalized in the same way that ethnic groups are, and we get ‘castes’. For the same reasons, I think that feudal classes have been similarly naturalized. Other social categories, however, are probably processed more as artifactual than as ‘natural’. Only more research will answer these questions.

VII.Conclusion

The evidence from Mongolia supports the hypothesis that humans process ethnies as natural living-kinds (theoretical considerations suggest that they do so at the generic-species level). My Torguud subjects have a blood-based model for assigning individuals into ethnies. Beyond this, they consider such assignment to carry implications for behavior even without any exposure to other members of their ethnic category, and they seem to think the ineffable essence is carried somehow ‘inside’. All of these parallel essentialist thinking in natural living kinds, suggesting that my subjects’ thinking about ethnies is not only primordialist but essentialist, and that there is no difference between an ethnie and a generic-species from the point of view of the schemas that are primed to process them. Processing endogamous norm groups as ‘species’, I have argued, is adaptive because (1) it allows us to learn a lot about them in a very cheap way, in particular by making inductive inferences about non-obvious properties, and (2) because it enables processes of discrimination that prevent us from incurring the costs of coordination failure. The reason these benefits have been obtained specifically by processing them as ‘species’ results from the fact that ethnies exhibit the most diagnostic features of ‘species’: (1) group-based endogamy; (2) descent-based membership. This made it easy for a blind evolutionary process to exapt a preexisting architecture by simply failing to discourage the priming by ethnies of the ‘living kinds’ module. Contra Rothbart and Taylor (1992), however, I don’t think this is how we think of social categories in general, but only those which, as in ethnies, exhibit the strongly diagnostic features of biological species, such as feudal classes and castes.

VIII.References

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1 An 'exaptation' is the harnessing of a preexisting structure to serve a novel function; in this case a mechanism for processing natural 'living kinds' that began accepting ethnies as an input.

2 A similar criterion should operate for results that are ‘statistically significant’, by the way, but the classical view has strangely prevailed over what should obviously be a fuzzy category.

3 Even if by ‘arbitrate’ we mean the emergent ‘Saussurian’ consensus which is the result not of any act of legislation, but of more or less mutually reinforcing patterns of practice.

4 Phenotypes in the two groups are indistinguishable to my eyes and I suspect that this holds as well for my informants. I will test this next time I go to the field.

5 Ündecten is a good translation for ‘ethnie’. Not only is the word used at the same level of contrast as ‘ethnie’, it has the same polysemic ambiguities as ‘ethnie’, shading into ‘race’ on one end, and ‘tribe’ on the other.

6 Rips’ (1989:43-47) manipulations with artifacts suggest that although notions of functionality certainly underlie our processes of categorization for these things, it is conventional functionality, rather than the current employment of an object, that determines its categorization.

7 _ Macro-mutations, or chromosomal mutations (e.g. when the number of chromosomes accidentally gets doubled during reproduction, as seems to have happened for some plant species) can lead to spontaneous speciation. But the overwhelming majority of speciation processes are gradual (even in the most accelerated, Steve-Gouldian, ‘punctuated’ cases; see Dennett). But, even granting these few exceptions, they are not really exceptions to the non-essentialist nature of species, for even here we cannot know in advance what sorts of changes will justify naming a new species—that is always a post facto maneuver (notice, for example, that some humans have more or less than the total number of chromosomes typically found in humans (e.g. Down-Syndrome individuals). They are not for that any less human. Thus, as modern biologists we cannot really pretend that an ‘essence’ is specifiable for any biological species.

8 A really interesting result is that children attributed the behavioral properties of their ‘kind’ to infant animals 87% of the time, but the physical properties only 40% of the time. The attribution of the physical properties goes up considerably (to 67%) when asked about the animals once they’ve grown to adulthood. This suggests that children think behaviors are developmentally stable but physical features are not. Why? Cubs are certainly friendly while adults are fierce. . .

9 I am arguing for plausibility here, but adding a Darwinian functional assumption (as I do further below), will make the conclusion logically necessary. As with any hypothetico-deductive argument, our confidence in it must rest on our confidence that (1) the assumptions are reasonable, (2) the same conclusion cannot be reached by an even more plausible deduction, and (3) the empirical evidence supports both the assumptions and predictions flowing from the conclusion..

10 Quine (1977:166) was the first to observe the usefulness of natural kind induction, and the likely Darwinian explanation for it.